September 2017

The Expedition 53 crew members continued testing a new exercise device today while also exploring how their bodies are adapting to living in space. The station residents are also gearing up for three spacewalks planned in October.

Three-dimensional (3-D) subsurface radar volumes generated from thousands of 2-D radar profiles are revealing new information about the polar regions of Mars, including more accurate mapping of CO2 and water ices, the discovery of buried impact craters, and new elevation data.

Disaster relief workers on the ground in Mexico City were responding to this week's 7.1-magnitude earthquake by using a suitcase-sized radar instrument capable of detecting human heartbeats under rubble.

The Expedition 53 crew worked on a variety of astronomy gear today that looks at meteors in Earth orbit and harmful radiation from deep space. The crew also explored how microgravity affects human bones and muscles.

A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed influx of warm water into the bay where they're located.

Phenomena across the Universe emit radiation spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum -- from high-energy gamma rays, which stream out from the most energetic events in the cosmos, to lower-energy microwaves and radio waves.

The scorching hot surface of Mercury seems like an unlikely place to find ice, but research over the past three decades has suggested that water is frozen on the first rock from the Sun, hidden away on crater floors that are permanently shadowed from the Sun's blistering rays.

Expedition 53 is gearing up for three maintenance spacewalks set to take place in October over a period of two weeks. Meanwhile, the six-member crew continued researching today how their long-term missions in space affect their bodies.

Today - Node 1 Communication: Ground teams utilized the video conferencing system to patch Space to Ground channel 2 (S/G2) to an SSC in Node 1, and asked the crew to confirm that S/G2 voice was audible in Node 1.

SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at approximately 10:14 a.m. EDT, southwest of Long Beach, California, and the recovery process is underway, marking the end of the company's twelfth contracted cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station for NASA.

A thrilling epoch in the exploration of our solar system came to a close today, as NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a fateful plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending its 13-year tour of the ringed planet.

The province of Syracuse on the southeastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily is pictured in this image from the Sentinel-2A satellite. The provincial capital - also called Syracuse - is visible in the lower-central part of the image.

An international team of astronomers have created the longest consistent 3D model of a neutrino-driven supernova explosion to date, helping scientists to better understand the violent deaths of massive stars.

Three new crew members have arrived to the International Space Station. The hatches on the space station and Soyuz MS-06 opened at 1:08 a.m. EDT, marking the arrival to the orbiting laboratory for Expedition 53-54 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA and Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos.

The BoldlyGo Institute (BoldlyGo) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have signed a Space Act Agreement to cooperate on "Project Blue," a mission to search for potentially habitable Earth-size planets in the Alpha Centauri system using a specially designed space telescope.

The Milky Way is chock-full of star clusters. Some contain just a few tens-to-hundreds of young stars. Others, known as globular clusters, are among the oldest objects in the universe and contain up to a million ancient stars.

The three orbiting Expedition 53 crew members explored growing new lung tissue, foods that affect the immune system and microscopic particles suspended in liquids. Another trio of crew members is just a day away from launching to the International Space Station and beginning a five-and-a-half month stay in space.

Today - Lighting Effects: The crew completed a visual assessment test in the Crew Quarters (CQs) by setting the light to the correct mode, turning all other light sources in the CQ off, and performing one Numerical Verification Test and one Color Discrimination Test.

Today's science tasks included an inspection on an advanced microscope and readying a magnetic field experiment. The crew also worked on a failed electrical device that was robotically transferred to the Kibo laboratory module in early August.

Scientists on NASA's Juno mission have observed massive amounts of energy swirling over Jupiter's polar regions that contribute to the giant planet's powerful aurora - only not in ways the researchers expected.

Composite image of category 5 Hurricane Irma, the strongest storm to ever form in the Atlantic, approaching the Carribbean, followed closely by tropical storm Jose to the south-east, at 06:00 UTC on Wednesday, 6 September 2017.

Today - 50 Soyuz (50S) Undock: 50S, with Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer, and Fyodor Yurchikin onboard, undocked Saturday at 4:58 PM CDT and landed in Kazakhstan at 8:22 PM CDT. The ISS will be in 3-crew operations until the arrival of 52S on September 13.

BoldlyGo Institute and a consortium of prominent organizations including The SETI Institute, UMass Lowell, and Mission Centaur launched a crowdfunding campaign to support first phase of mission development.

NASA and NOAA satellites have been providing valuable satellite imagery to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center, and revealed that Hurricane Irma has strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane on Sept. 5 around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC).

New work from a team of Carnegie scientists (and one Carnegie alumnus) asked whether any gas giant planets could potentially orbit TRAPPIST-1 at distances greater than that of the star's seven known planets.

The Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 52 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of Roscosmos and Flight Engineers Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Sunday, Sept. 3, 2017 (Kazakh time).

Radar images of asteroid 3122 Florence obtained at the 70-meter antenna at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex between August 29 and September 1 have revealed that the asteroid has two small moons.